I was wondering if anyone has any ideas about taking the guts of a ibook, and putting them into a pbg3? I always liked the look of the old pb's but the performance = poo. There is a used computer store with both for fairly cheap, but I don't want to just jump in.

This is a VERY cool idea that I had been thinking a lot about too. The 14" iBook in the Pismo case would rock. The iBooks ports are on the left, where as the PB's are in the rear, If your rotate the iBook board 90º that places the Hard disk on the left over the PB's PCMCIA slots and the optical drive in reasonably the correct place as well. The DC in board is a seperate piece so you should be able to mount it in the PB's location as well. No way to do PCMCIA, sorry, You might have to perminantly mount the optical drive bay, even if you mounted the iBook's jack well enough to allow the bay to still slide in and out, not sure if iBook's Motherboard would allow the hot swap. The battery, keyboard and trackpad would be the big challange. You could use the iBook's keyboard (or the black one from a titanium 500-600 would work too and look better) But I don't know about the battery (would pismos work? it sure looks similar, voltage and contacts anyone?) and I have no idea on the trackpad without having both in front of me.

For me It came down to wanting to add features. The case conversion alone would be very cool, but I wanted to use the larger case to fit extra components, I thought about dual optical drives or maybe dual batteries. (some of you may remember my iBook dual battery posts not long ago) In the end I just did not have time and money to dive into this.

First, I would upgrade a pismo before buying an ibook. Just my opinion. As for the mod, thats an interesting idea. It could get expensive buying both books though. Remember as you turn the logic board you lcd connections move farther from the lcd. The battery will probably be a big issue too. In order for it to work well, it has to be tight against its connections, which could be difficult considering its portable. I suggest you give this a lot of thought and planning before starting. Im not trying to shoot it down, just being realistic. It can be done.-maestro

I am with maestro on this. His concerns are very accurate and should be considered before taking on this project. The only part that I may add is that if your iBook is significantly faster (such as a G4), then I would consider moving the components into a G3 PowerBook case, otherwise you may as well upgrade the PowerBook.

mordaskyt brought up a great point with the DC board. On the icebooks, they are a separate component and can be brought over to the I/O port location on the G3 PowerBook. If there is not enough rotation room, you can cover the original I/O ports with a piece of Styrene and new ones can be created on the side with a Dremel tool.

The only issues I see are the optical drive and the battery. The batter could be opened up and put inside the PBG3's casing, to make it flush. Given that you don't always remove the battery, you can add wires to stretch to the iBook board if there is not enough slack to work with. You should be able (I have no reason not to believe) to use the PBG3's optical drive cover as well, though you would have to extend the wires since icebooks have short ribbons.

Sidenote: With the introduction of having a separate, replacable, DC input board Apple has done the repair and modding community a great favor. On older Apple laptops, the connector was prone to being lifted out of the board and would have to be resoldered. I have done this on a number of Apple laptops throughout my repair experience and this innovation was greatly appreciated. Sadly enough, over 90% of the ones I saw were user care related, though that's not an excuse.

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